Annie Kenney
Union of Britain |party= Congregationists |events= |status= Alive }}Annie Kenney is a syndicalist politician of the Union of Britain, most well known for her advocacy of women's suffrage and pacifism with the Reichspakt. History Early life Annie Kenney was born in Springhead, the fourth daughter of 12 children. The family was poor and working class, and Kenney started part-time work in a local cotton mill at the age of 10, as well as attending school. She started full-time work at 13, which involved 12-hour shifts from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening. She was employed as a "tenter", a weaver's assistant, part of her job being to fit the bobbins and to attend to the strands of fleece when they broke; during one such operation, one of her fingers was ripped off by a spinning bobbin. She remained at the mill for 15 years, was involved in trade-union activities, furthered her education through self-study. Kenney met some fellow suffragettes at a Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) meeting in Bath and she agreed to help organise a local women's suffrage campaign. The house chosen to house this campaign became known as "Suffragette's Retreat" and they began to plant trees in honour of working women. The trees were known as "Annie's Arboreatum" after Annie Kenney. There was also a "Pankhurst Pond" within the grounds named after Kenney's future lover, Christabel Pankhurst, who she met at Suffragette's Retreat. During a Liberal rally at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in October 1905, Kenney and her lover, Christabel Pankhurst, interrupted a political meeting to ask Churchill and Sir Edward Grey if they believed women should have the right to vote. Neither replied. The women unfurled a banner declaring "Votes for Women", and shouted at the politicians demanding answers to their questions. Kenney and Pankhurst were thrown out of the meeting and arrested for causing an obstruction and a technical assault on a police officer. Kenney was imprisoned for three days for her part in the protest, and 13 times in total. Kenney became part of the senior hierarchy of the WSPU, becoming its deputy in 1912, unusual in such a middle class organisation. On one occasion in January 1914 when she had just been released from prison and was very weak, it was reported in The Times that at a meeting chaired by Norah Dacre Fox the WSPU general secretary at Knightsbridge Town Hall: "Miss Kenney was conveyed to the meeting in a horse ambulance; and she was borne into the meeting on a stretcher." The Weltkrieg At the outbreak of the Weltkrieg in 1914, Kenney called an end to suffragette militancy and urged the women to become actively involved in war work by taking on jobs that had traditionally been regarded as in the male preserve, as most of those men were now absent at the front. Kenny wrote in one of the pages of "The Suffragette", a women's rights newspaper, the slogan that it was "a thousand times more the duty of the militant Suffragettes to fight the Kaiser for the sake of liberty than it was to fight anti-Suffrage Governments". In autumn 1915 Kenney travelled to South Wales, the Midlands and Clydeside on a recruiting and lecture tour to encourage trade unions to support war work. Kenney took her message as far afield as France and the United States. After the war, Kenney and her lover continued to fiercely advocate for women's suffrage. Both women began to support the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) as a means of combating the growing authoritarian nature of the government. Kenney was arrested multiple times for her protests to the government crackdowns on strikes. The British Revolution During the 1925 General Strike Kenney convinced many of the working women of Britain to join the TUC. As the strike soon spiralled into a revolution, her advocacy massively inflated support for the toppling of the old regime. Following the official proclamation of the Union of Britain on 3 June 1925, she subsequently began to pressure the new socialist government to grant political rights to women. Political career She plans to run as a candidate for the TUC Chair of the Union of Britain under the pacifist Congregationist faction, in protest of the TUC's alleged failure to secure equality between men and women. Kenney has risen to prominence as the leading voice for peace between the Syndicalists and the Reichspakt. She hopes that under her leadership, the Union might not pursue a belligerent path. Personal life Her relationship with Christabel Pankhurst has become a key point of interest in British politics, with it being a grey area among many of the factions. Although Kenney did meet her lover, Pankurst, while at Suffragette's Retreat, it has been a persistent rumour that Kenney had several other female sleeping partners while she stayed there. Kenney calls these rumours "completely false" and simply fabricated by her opponents to undermine female politics. Category:People Category:Europeans Category:British-related topics